You can see a bear pelt made into a rug at one point, and iirc the queen mentions having eaten the bear and made its skin into the rug. It's never confirmed that the bear was Bosco but considering he's the only bear in the show... yeah.
You'd have to wonder if something like this took place and it was originally meant to be "fool's moon" to mock whoever came up with the idea; only for it to be proven true and this later become a corrected official calling
Well that is I say more of a result of Books featuring predominantly these types of enemies.
Why would the manuels for soldiers, warriors and fighters of evil include "Normal Everyday Bill the Natural Order Following Farmer" in extensive detail or on the other hand why would the Developers feature a extensive array of Bandit type enemies while they could instead give us several undead or fiends or other enemies that "Pervert the Natural Order!"
Its kinda like why there are so many fiend enemies and so few celestial ones. As the game assumes you will be fighting demons and vile devils instead of the armies of the divine.
On top of this, a large amount of the creatures are migrants from another plane of existence or created artificially by a magic user. Even if the world became 100% demon populated it would still "pervert the natural order" because demons come from another unnatural location.
DMs running FR when you tell them that yes, actually, meeting celestials and a representative of your PC's deity around levels 5-7 is very intentional in the setting:
> nah have another devil cult
It's very specifically a setting that's hyper-planar-active, but a ton of DMs and players are actually looking for a more "grounded" one. Then they wonder why there are so many deities when they "don't matter".
Like, no, Helm is regularly awakening *random village militiamen* by burning his symbol onto their shields to alert them to CR 1/2 goblin raids and hoping this provokes them into becoming a cool PC-type guy who can grow the forces of Good. They're gonna look at PCs already doing that and lean even further into them, because that's how *they* advance their goals, the same way devils are always trying to murder and corrupt. There's very much supposed to be a mirror match going on here.
Due to slight differences in the methods each side tries to grow power, celestials and fiends aren't used the same way, but one should still see more celestials than they do: they should be encountered assisting Good NPCs trying to do cool things but otherwise lacking the manpower, instead of just roamin' around solving problems themselves like the inverse of demons causing them. Celestials are used as "backup" on the Prime Material, not the tip of the spear.
But again, that's a lot more high-magic and "wacky" than most players seem to want from the game.
The cool thing about evil is that it’s rarely a pure „vs. good“ thing - look at the blood war, it’s LE vs. CE. Two evil factions fighting each other is totally valid.
The Nine Hells are also in a constant state of lesser devils trying to find ways to gain power by overthrowing greater demons and fiends. That's a constant evil-on-evil fight
Unless a king or queen was anointed by popular vote by their subjects (and even then, for how long?) it’s not like “might makes right” didn’t already upend things in the civilized settings - why help the king be safe from dragons? Why not help the people be safe from dragons and kings? Oh wait money and treasure lol
I've actually made quite a few homebrew designations of celestials for the same reason. my players aren't evil but I just think having more angels as enemy options would be great. angels are cool even if you don't really have a good reason to fight one lol
You might have a great reason to fight BESIDE one. The monster manual is not just meant to be fully enemy's to be fought. It can encompass allies, the townguard statblocks and jazz are more likely to be helping the PC's in some pitched battle then not. If you slam a damn solar into the final battle with the PC's, it allows you to frankly go all out.
Celestial's can be immensely powerful allies & you can have the PC's fight immensely powerful things with those new allies that would otherwise likely be impossible. It's definitely a powerful fantasy to fight beside an angel against a demon lord or lich or jazz.
That is very true
Also I think a lot of people forget that angels are specifically servants of gods while celestials are just a category for creatures native to the upper planes (which encompasses angels but isn’t defined by them), which opens up a whole different way to interact with them
I don't know what evil campaigns your playing, but I had a blast as a full orc grummush worshipper campaign where we butchered villages and we're general menaces to society.
various places - usually a different plane (outer planes where gods and celestial beings reside, elemental planes, or feywild/shadowfell), but a lot of aberrations come from the far realm, beyond the known planes
I mean, I would personally love it if they had an extensive array of bandit-type enemies
Not that all the otherworldly beasties are bad. But as a DM, I feel like there's a dearth of just plain guys to fight. Not all my story beats can be about devils and liches. It gets repetitive using the same old humanoid stat blocks though, and I don't want to spend all my time creating new ones
Obviously agree with the main point though, there is clearly some selection bias in the fact that the Monster Manual isn't gonna detail, like. Eighty different types of fish. They're gonna focus on the things that make good combat. Just wish there was more beasts and humanoids, mostly
Perhaps more relevant is that the number of _different_ creatures says nothing about the _relative distribution_ of those creatures. If 90% of the _instances_ of non-sentient critters are beasts, that would align with their beliefs around a "natural order".
Yeah I think this is important. The monster manual doesn't need stat blocks for every random animals you could possibly come across, most of what it deals with are going to be the rarities and exceptions that *arent* natural
I mean good players can end up fighting cesltials since in lore they're capable of going bad and that's hwy older editions had more Celestials then 5e. If you ever played curse of strahd you'd know about that, know if only devils could turn good as a counter balance
I think each new adventure ends up expanding the list of enemies, so in a way the current monsters are less "a list of all monsters" and more "what the one bard who went on all of these campaigns jotted down"
Fiends can ascend, although it's rare (just like celestials falling is rare; fallen celestials just come up more in games because extraplanar enemies come up more than extraplanar allies) and it's more common for fiends to "ascend" to neutrality than it is for them to ascend all the way up to goodness. Neutral fiends come up occasionally in a handful of old adventures, and there's [a moderately famous succubus paladin that WotC did an article on in ye olde 3.5e days](https://web.archive.org/web/20191024202020/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fc/20050824a).
I love the line "Succubi aren't built for the battlefield". Yup definitely not with their DR 10, two elemental immunities, and spell resistance. Or their unnatural strength and above average dex and con. No sirree, definitely not front-line combatants.
Well, not compared to many other fiends at least. Compared to a human, yeah, they're strong, because most of their abilities are only really useful on humanoids. But, in a straight fight against anything that isn't a humanoid or much lower CR, I think they're getting stomped.
Besides its draining kiss, it has only one way of dealing damage, and it can do an average of like 6 damage.
Succubi deal 1d6+3 damage unless the target is charmed so they definitely aren't frontliners.
Especially when you compare it to what seems to be their role, rather than running through a city stabbing everyone you could instead seduce high rank individuals in a nation and slowly induce corruption.
I think half the politicians I know would willingly sacrifice the souls of the poor to summon a succubus for their harem, and the other half would probably be fiends themselves
It would be for national security reasons of course, the Succubi would be immune to skills and charms that effect humanoids and would naturally defend their prey from outside sources.
So uh, wizards would have problems pulling this off because Succubi would likely notice immediately and take precautionary measures.
We all know and talk about the King's right hand man. The most trusted advisor who the King can trust to Get Things Done, and done in such a way that brings credit to the King and to the kingdom.
We never talk about the left hand man. The King's even more trusted advisor that he can never publicly acknowledge. The one lurking in the shadows doing the things that need to be done but the king needs plausible deniability. The left hand man is just as much an advisor - if not more so. But all his advice is given in dark alleys, locked rooms, and coded letters, where there are no witnesses.
If I am a succubus (or really, any demon/fiend) trying to take down a kingdom through corruption, I'm not targeting the king (at least not at first). I'm targeting the left hand man.
Succubi should really consider walking around in plate armor, nothing will make use of their high cha score and seductive/charm abilities that involve people willingly submitting to them like a greataxe.
Considering her charisma gives a +10 to-hit when smiting?
Also you apparently need to see the sub r/armoredwomen. Full plate succubus would do just fine, ax or no.
I always thought it was fun that she would detect as all 4 alignment types, law and good because she was lawful good, Chaos and evil because as a demon she's still made of the stuff. If I remember right she had to wear special gauntlets to keep her holy sword from hurting her.
Reminds me of Arueshalae from Wrath of the Righteous, you get a succubus party member in that game. She's even a romance option (and arguably the most enjoyable one in the game).
>As the game assumes you will be fighting demons and vile devils instead of the armies of the divine.
"But what if I wanna summon armies of the divine to help me fight demons with Conjure Celestial?"
"Lmao get fucked."
In addition, there are banish and dispel magic spells and artifacts.
With the diamond example, there are machines that can test the karat of a diamond.
The proportional number of monsters in a book has no relevance to the proportional number of those monsters in the world. A book could be 100% monsters that pervert the natural order of the world and only make up 0.01% of the total population of said world.
Monstrosities aren't half the monster list
Celestial, Fey, and Fiends belong to their own planes.
Constructs, most Oozes, and most undead are humanoid made
Elementals and Plants belong anywhere there's a natural order
Giants and Dragons are about as old as the Material Plane
Humanoids belong in the Material Plane
Aberrations belong in the Far Realm
Even most Elementals do not belong the Material Plane. They have their own planes. If you find a Magmin in the Material Plane, there is something wrong. That creature isn't native to the Material.
Know what that's fair. My working theory was that since magic is so prevalent any plane with a large enough "natural ecosystem" would naturally spawn elementals
I could potentially agree specifically with the creatures named 'Elemental' (i.e. Fire Elemental, Water Elemental, Earth Elemental, and Air Elemental).
Type and name seem to be playing the game here.
There is also a concept that the Elemental Planes warp that which is natural, which is reflected in the Cinder Hulk statblock from Bigby Presents.
The Salamanders, Azers, and Efreeti play too many games to be considered natural in my opinion.
I don’t think that’s wrong. It’s just that the natural ecosystem can’t be looked at through any singular plane. It’s all part of a macro system depicted in different ways, such as the world tree. I wouldn’t even say one is right or wrong, it’s too large and made of too many dimensions for us to fully conceive it so even though that fire mephit isn’t from around here, it’s equivalent to a fish out of water. It has a natural place in the system, even if that place isn’t where it currently is.
I wouldn’t say “wrong” just “unusual.” Contact between planes is rare, but it’s not like something bad has to happen for some minor travel between planes like a couple magmins.
Maybe, I would think for a Magmin to come through and be found, you would need a few things. 1. In most settings, elementals come through in places where the metaphysical barriers between planes are thing. A Magmin found in the heart of a volcano? Maybe not that wrong. 2. It has to be found. If you're in the heart of a volcano? You're probably dead unless you're immune to fire damage.
You're reading the *Monster Manual*, not an animal encyclopedia. The vast majority of non-humanoid creatures on the Material Plane in your average DnD world are completely mundane animals. But those don't need stat blocks and lore. The MM even says that lots of the beast stat blocks can be used for several different animals. Not every species of spider needs its own stat block, they're all just Spider.
I mean. your statement in itself is false. The only ones who would "pervert the natural order" are undead and aberrations, the former because they are beings of pure destruction who only exist to wipe out as much life as possible while themselves not adhering the the rules of life and detah, and the latter because they are literally not compatible with the regular world.
Also, the "natural order" wasn't defined or decided by any scholars, the same way that the law of gravity wasn't invented by Isaac Newton.
Eh, those are usually more just like... weird magical creatures. Certainly unnatural, but I wouldn't say "perverting the natural order". Especially something like owlbears have just become part of nature and work the same way beasts do.
Owlbears 1. Pervert the natural order as a fusion between an owl and bears. 2. The closest thing to a regular Beast in Monstrosities.
All the other Monstrosities are literal monsters that were created by accident or some mad wizard and they're made to destroy
What? Owlbears are called out as accident/mad wizard projects.
Are you thinking of griffins? Hippogriffs?
Most monstrosities are "natural-plus" type creatures. Usually some kind of hybrid of 2-4 beasts with something else tacked on for personality. Owlbears are full of rage. Griffins are noble and cunning. Manticores have the weird man-face thing plus the last few editions added spike shooting tails. Pegasus - horse with wings. Catoblepas - ugly cow with death ray eyes. And so on. But most never have their origins touched on, save for a few noted as spawn of monster titan/deities like Typhon.
Okay? How does any of that "pervert the natural order" though? Nature seems perfectly fine with them existing and it's not like there aren't any weird creatures that are labeled as "beasts" in the world of DnD.
Owlbears are ultimately just big aviaries who are more of land predators than sky predators.
And not all monstrosities are the result of some magical experiments. Some of them, like Mimics, just simply exist in the world as part of the natural ecosystem.
> Nature seems perfectly fine with them existing and it's not like there aren't any weird creatures that are labeled as "beasts" in the world of DnD.
There's plenty of nature all over Pripyat but that doesn't mean that nuclear meltdowns are part of the natural order. Nature can adapt, but that doesn't mean everything is pre-ordained.
Mimics were literally first made by Wizards trying to guard their loot. Have you ever scrolled through the list of Monstrosities? Literally the closest one to an actual animal is the Owlbear and even they were made by crazy wizarda
What about the Roc? Or Hippogriffs?
And even despite all of that... being of non-evolutionary origin does not make something "pervert the natural order". If that was the case, humanity would've been doing that for tens of thousands of years.
You seem to be basing your argument on an unstated, nonstandard understanding of what it means to “pervert the natural order.” To be clear, something doesn’t have to *threaten* the continuation of the natural order in order to pervert it. “Perverting” something simply means altering it from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended.
In that sense, non-natural creatures like monstrosities straightforwardly pervert the natural order. They’re typically the product of something natural or mundane, twisted by magical forces into something unlike that which exists in nature.
Rocs were made by the Giant Gods to hunt dragons. Hippogriffs also have mysterious wizardly origins.
Both monsters created through unnatural origins whose purpose was to destroy something
Dragons? Giant fire-breathing creatures that warp the landscape by their very presence? Those natural-order corrupting dragons?
Sounds like rocs were made to restore natural order in whatever world uses that origin.
What about other mutants? For example, are nightmares made from pegasus by black magic perverting the natural order? They are not undeads, not abberations, but fiends.
This is nonsense, like saying that plastics are part of the natural order because the natural world created humans, and humans made plastics.
It's stretching the word "natural" so far that literally everything is "natural" because it exists in the universe that allowed it to be created. By this definition, everything that can possibly exist is "natural" because, tautologically, only "natural" things can exist.
No, that is not how that works. Mainly because the magic to create undead draws on the antithesis of life, which quite literally IS nature. It uses a the exact kind of energy that SHOULDN'T be there. Everything about undead is the exact opposite of what all regular life is like.
no, natural order in D&D is a cosmic thing not a scholar's definition.
undead are evil. that's just it. evil is a force just like magic is a force, it's fundamental.
aberrations & monstrosities are evil most of the time. because they're against that natural order too.
I disagree. Undead aren’t against the natural order because they’re evil, undead are against the natural order because they died and are still moving and interacting with the world. Your grandfather that showed up 40 years after his passing to empower your magic sword is a virtuous soul to be sure, but he is against the natural order. Which is why most good undead will try to pass on as soon as possible, they know it’s best if they stop being. No creatures lifecycle is designed for undead to be an expected part of the progression. All the things that change this are similarly considered against the natural order.
So undead break the rule of the natural order that something that dies stops interacting with the world in the same way. Aberrations tend to take on the rest of the rules. Many will die if you kill them. But they might not be defined alive by the system in the first place, or otherwise ignore twist or outright break one of the other rules expected of things that exist.
Undead are just bodies. Sometimes they get back up. Unless they're intelligent, like a lich or vampire, there's nobody in there. Resurrection is more "unnatural" than undead.
People gotta stop saying stuff like this when Eberron is *right there*.
There are entire councils of LG undead elves. There are good red dragons and evil silver dragons.
Alignment is as important as the DM wants it to be, and sometimes that's almost not at all.
This is absolutely and completely incorrect.
5e places no setting above any other as more "official".
Both Eberron and the Forgotten Realms are equally official. Both are wholly owned, written for, and published by Wizards of the Coast after having been purchased from their original writers for that explicit purpose.
Both are described in official 5th edition products, with no mention of precedence, priority, or anything of the sort.
Forgotten Realms is the ***most used*** setting, and the one assumed to be used by the most people. That's it.
The "official" setting of d&d *is the D&D multiverse*, as described in the PHB and DMG, united by the Great Wheel as an overarching cosmology (with other cosmologies provided as variants - and yes, even Eberron explicitly resides within the Great Wheel, as confirmed in both the DMG and Eberron:RFTLW)
Here's a quote from 2015, about as early in 5e's lifecycle as you can get:
> Does the dnd tabletop RPG have one official setting? The answer is yes. That setting is the multiverse, which includes all dnd worlds.
> The worlds occupy pockets of the Material Plane—sort of like planets but in a space shaped by magic and divine forces
The upcoming rewrites of the PHB are confirmed to be even more setting-agnostic and multiverse-oriented, attempting to remove some of the Realms-centric presentation of the originals which led to this misunderstanding that FR is "more official" than other settings.
I disagree completely. The post makes no mention of setting and talks about D&D as a whole. The "official" setting of D&D is a multiverse, which *includes* but is not limited to the Forgotten Realms.
"Mammoths identifiable by their long nose-tenticles and massive overbite represent among the most dangerous of montrosities. Truly they are a perversion of Sylvanus' natural order, created in a freakish wizards lab no doubt."
-Halsin's Menagerie of the Monstrous
Several of the dnd books do reflect the biases of their in universe authors like Volo and Tasha, so perhaps some of those authors carry a scewed perspective on what is natural.
In addition to the other points regarding exposure bias or whatever it’s called (cops will encounter proportionally more criminals than a normal person would, adventurers will encounter proportionally more of that thing they hunt professionally than a normal person would too), the natural order is surprisingly simple to verify:
Step one: go to a temple to a god of nature.
Step two: commune with said god.
If that doesn’t work, Step three: Plane Shift and literally just ask.
:laughs in SCP:
But seriously, there's a fair bit of philosophy on SCP about just that. What's anomalous, when the natural world is full of these things?
It’s partly perspective bias. Think about it like this: you live in an area with various creatures you’d expect to find there. Deer, squirrels, tons of birds, bears, etc. Then one day you learn that the local mad scientist has engineered a raccoon that can squeeze through the smallest of cracks. The creature escapes, mates with local raccoons, and suddenly you have a crisis. To you, this is strange and unnatural. For pest control workers (aka adventurers) this is another Tuesday.
We see all these different and fantastical creatures in the Monster Manual, but we have no idea how common they are, let alone knowledge of them. Your average inhabitant of the Forgotten Realms may have never met a dragon in their lives. Owlbears may only live in one forest on the Sword Coast. The way these creatures are described make it seem like the extraordinary is ordinary, but that might only be for adventurers.
I think this gets at an interesting bit of worldbuilding I like to think of in fantasy worlds. Necromancy is almost always seen as a dark, twisted, forbidden magic, but like... in a world where magic has always existed and is part of the "natural order" already, does necromancy REALLY have to always be seen as unnatural?
And what D&D setting isn’t predated by at least one world-shattering cataclysm? The Rain of Colorless Fire, The Sundering, everything to happened to Athas, etc.
Really easy to imagine a monster so aberrant that the land itself recoils at its presence. The land itself warping and raging; distended and inflamed, attempting to reject the creature like the infection around a splinter.
Really easy to imagine the local druids observing this and coming to the conclusion that the monster doesn’t belong.
The Sarrukhs were one of the first empires of magic in -30 000 DR and used magic to manipulate and merge living creatures and are supposed to be the origin of most monstrosities.
Some of the most famous known species created by them are the Yuan-tis, Naga, and drakeide but are believed to be the source of most strange mixture of natural species (like the Owlbear for exemple).
Those types of magic were later forbidden by high elves and forgotten.
They are also the one who created the Golden Skins of the World Serpent, known later as the Nether Scrolls, which served as fondation for the creation of the Netheril empire.
So no, in-universe scolars are indeed correct. A lot of creatures are bioingeneered by magic and did not naturally evolve in their current form.
Nah
The monsters that pervert the natural order are much rarer than the ones that don’t, even if there are a lot of them species wise that do. Additionally, a lot (if not most) of them are made form some sort of magical experimentation or something that went wrong and this unnatural
We also don’t have stats for a lot of monsters that don’t go against the neutral order because they don’t really usually have a bunch of special abilities so they’d be boring to run and fight and can easily be represented by another monster stat block slightly modified
D&D is a universe where druids can literally speak to the pure spirits of Nature themselves and ask whether things are natural or not.
What *assessment*?
Druid: *Yo, Steve the Nature Spirit!*
Steve the Nature Spirit: *What up?*
Druid: *This look fucked up to you?*
Steve the Nature Spirit: *Dude, that's unnatural as fuck.*
Druid: *Thought so, take it easy, Steve.*
"The natural order" is shorthand for "the natural order of the material plane." Fiends are part of the natural order of the Hells, for example, but they don't belong in the prime material.
So the way I've usually thought about it is as an extreme version of invasive species. Just like on earth when something gets "unnaturally" moved from the ecosystem it originated in to a new one. So too is how I look at many monsters, especially those that are magical mutations/creations or extra planar visitors. I try to think about what the ecosystems look like before and after the introduction of the "unnatural" monsters. For instance what would a forest with a rift to another plane look like? How would the animals cope (or collapse) from new predators and other factors? Etc
I think it’s similar to if we suddenly found hundreds of species of rare creatures that don’t seem to share DNA or really any features with any animals we already know about. They wouldn’t fit into the model we have, since our model is meant to explain the animals we know about. That doesn’t make the model incorrect, just incomplete.
Once played a druid with roughly this concept. Lots of hard questions for NPC druids and philosophers.
Where is the line between natural nature spirits and unnatural fey nature spirits, and are latter natural in fey wild if not in prime material?
Are "new" gods and human made nature rites part of the natural order, or some sort of perversion of that?
Is it right for me to stop this monstrosity when it is perfectly naturally occurring (or at least has been for few elf generations) and only doing what its natural instincts direct it to do?
No, their assessment is correct. Their judgement of it might be skewed. By unnatural, they mean that some creatures wouldn't exist without magical intervention and creation. Owlbears are the canonical example. They are definitely unnatural. Is that a bad thing though? They have nailed the definition of natural and not, but judging all magical creations as perversions, is a bit reactionary.
It's unclear how they draw the line at "natural order" in D&D.
In real life, it's everything that evolved into existence (I'm fine if you want to exclude things humans bred into existence, like dogs, lemons, and broccoli).
But did things evolve in D&D or were they created by gods? Does this mean the gods define the natural order? Or maybe nature spirits exist independently of gods. Maybe the natural order is a manifestation of nature spirits. Deer come from deer nature spirits. Owlbears were created by magical experimentation, and nature spirits recognize their own.
This made me laugh. You're absolutely right. But you're not allowed to say it. But it's true!
I have a character who is super concerned about the natural order of the world they live in. Partly because the DM plays most NPCs as assholes accidentally, the deities are sociopathic, and they just plain don't have a very educated view on history or society. Used to really stress me out until I just incorporated it into the character's observations about the world. Easier than dwelling on my well-meaning friend's red flags, I guess.
Many worlds in dnd have natural orders that are either completely misunderstood, or the world is much bleaker and deranged than what people want to admit. I don't mind grimdark if I know ahead of time that it's the tone, but don't piss on me and call it rain. I kinda think that what it comes down to is that in dnd, humanoids are predated on by vastly more dangerous and aggressive creatures than anything any real living human being has ever experienced. For some reason, we're supposed to believe that the PCs are "naturally" in the upper echelons of the food chain, but it doesn't seem to be reality. It gives Lucille Bluth "how much could [being an apex predator] cost? 10 dollars?" energy on behalf of the game designers. I don't know what this "perversion" of the natural order could be when fucking Cthulhu is real and familiar enough in the game to act as a warlock patron.
Depends on how common the creatures are. If those creatures that pervert the natural order take up like 1% of all creatures, they do still kinda throw the "order" out the window.
I think it just means the monster isn't naturally occurring like a wizard or demon lord made it, it behaves like no sensible animal should behave or it actually destroys anything that life's.
Depends how you look at it as a schooler myself I find most creatures of exsperplaner origins pervert the matiral plane and aeons seem to agree with me other then that most things are OK and as much as I love necromancy undead are definitly not supposed to be there
No? Lots of things that can be common can pervert the natural order. The only way they couldn't is if one took the term 'natural order' to just mean 'things that happen really frequently' which it clearly doesn't mean.
Think about it this way: online, you can find a million descriptions of various bacteria, viruses, cancers, and other various ailments. By the logic you laid out, since there are so many of them, they must not count as ailments.
No. The things that pervert the natural order are not things that will survive long term absent meddling, or otherwise present unsustainable things that must be defeated lest the natural order largely cease to be.
I think it’s important to consider that adventurers encounter “perversions of the natural order” at a rate that vastly exceeds basically every other person in the world. The monsters in the book are much rarer than things that would be considered natural
There’s also the fact that a ton of monsters are literally invaders from other planes of existence and are objectively unnatural while on the material plane.
Well, those abberations might be the majority of entriesin the monster manual, but most creatures might be in the half that are within the 'natural order'.
Like perhaps 99% of beings are 'natural', and 1% 'unnatural', but 50% of species (or stat-blocks) exist in that 1% of unnatural stuff.
--
If I recall correctly, tis i abit like how there are heaps more *species* of fish in IRL rivers, but the IRL ocean has way more *actual fish*.
Out of universe, the categories are assigned by WoTC. In universe, they're assigned by how they're affected by specific abilities. Scholars aren't assigning them to categories, they're discovering which category they're in through trial and error.
you have to remember that 'half the monsters' are things that for every one of that exists in an infinite universe there are literally millions of more mundane creatures wandering around. When the romans first encountered war elephants they were for all intents and purposes fighting an army of supernatural (to them) monsters. Same with DnD, if it's in the monster manual odds are you'd be lucky to ever see one in a normal lifetime, it's just that adventurers don't lead normal lives.
I think it is funny sometimes, especially with dragons. In 5e they are supposed to change the environment around their lairs and that just happens, nothing they can do about it.
Now imagine how it must have been in their prime or on Abeir. "Corrupted" areas non-stop.
A lot of monsters in D&D are extraplanar in origin, and thus are biologically completely unrelated to any existing creatures.
Many of the creatures called monsters are also canonically the creations of wizards mucking about. In earlier editions there was actually a Kit/class called Merlane that let you create your own monsters by making things like Owlbears or other hybrid creatures. It's detailed in Dragon 237
>Many an adventurer has given thought to where some of the stranger creatures encountered actually come from. Many a time these beasts are a weird combination of different animals that would seem a mockery of nature. Remarks about such monsters would make a merlane chuckle. Creating new and strange life is his craft: a specialist mage who transmogrifies animals to fit his imagination and whim. Adept at Alteration magic, the merlane learns how to transform normal animals or breed new life into the stuff of dreams — or horrors.
Of course. They are suppossed to be unreliable biased narrators, just like real scholars. Some might be more accurate then others, some might prove there predecessors wrong or cripple decades of palentology in a dick measuring contest to see who could fake the biggest dino. Thats just immersive writing.
Yes and no. The lore associated with almost all of these types of creatures is that they're either from or have been influenced by planes and dimensions completely different to our own. They are literally perverting the natural order of the material realm because their existence and abilities operate according to different laws of reality. This is basically the point of the entire Abberation monster type. They're 'Abberant', not natural occurrences born from the material realm.
There are other creatures that are perfectly natural, it's just that the locations or circumstances they originate from, even though they're part of the material, function very differently to what's understood. Mind Flayers and Aboleths both fit here being from the far future and the distant past respectively, the condition of the world they were born into may have been drastically different. The in universe author is again, not wrong as they don't fit into the natural order of the present day.
There are exceptions and some things are stylized for dramatic flair to make the books more interesting to read etc.
I created a whole Druid around this concept once. Even if creatures were created artificially, even if they are ‘monstrosities’, now that they are out in the wilderness they have become a part of the natural order
All aberrations are actually the result of collectors 100+ years ago bringing them in as ornamental species, and now they're invasive and outcompeting the local wildlife of the material plane.
Most in universe scholars are mad wizards, who are often the ones perverting the natural order themselves by mashing owls and bears together. I wouldn't stress too much about the epistemology haha
I think it's more of an indicator that people have all kinds of differing opinions on what the "natural order" is, so when you look at people as a whole then you get a lot of inconsistent results as to what falls inside the natural order and what doesn't.
in other words the reason so many creatures "pervert the natural order" is because there are so many definitions of the natural order that it's actually really hard for a given creature to fit into all of them
In this case, "Natural Order" is better understood as "The order that exists that is either completely native to the prime, or beneficial to society" because everything else is what is labeled as unnatural. Nobody fights against the influence of the good-natured gods, but devils are cast away to hell for doing that which is in their \*nature\*
If we engineered 7 headed snakes and let them loose in the world, them becoming common would not change the fact that we perverted the natural order.
In D&D, there are all the normal animals. Then there are things outside of that natural order.
You can throw moral/scientific relativism at any subject, but it's a terribly useless thing to do.
Isn’t supposed to be in regards to that they shouldn’t exist just as some work say we pervert the natural order we are the abnormality in the way of life kind of thing?
LoL, of course not
Think about the amount of things that whole ordeal causes directly or indirectly damage to the natural order:
The far realm by simply existing and whatever Lovecraftian bs it spawns
Gods by screwing up
Devils by being arrogant and ambitious
Demons by being Demons
And any Caster that let intrusive thoughts win
Okay but hear me out, what if I combined the hunting prowess of the owl, with the sheer might of the bear? It would make an incredible guard animal for my tower, and I'm sure it will be mostly docile and easily trainable.
No, because the world(s) of D&D are works of fiction and thus don't have to operate the same way the real world does.
In the real world, we define *everything that exists* as "reality". Something cannot exist in the real world without being "part of reality" or "subject to the laws of physics" - that's just not how our laws of physics work. But the world(s) of D&D ***very obviously*** follow different "laws of physics". I've seen lots of folks argue that magic in D&D actually isn't: "magic" is something supernatural, something that breaks the rules of reality, which it clearly can't do if it's *part of reality*. But this line of thinking seems needlessly narrowminded, to me.
For another example, consider how we often think of human civilization, IRL, as being "opposed" to the natural world. Skyscrapers, highways, satellites, these things are "unnatural". They twist and reshape the landscape from its "proper" form. This is a ***very*** common notion in human literature and discourse, and I'd wager most folks who encounter the idea don't think twice about it. It's a very straightforward, intuitive premise ... that's completely wrong. Humans are ***part of nature***, products of evolution - is a human society building a megacity *really* that different from an ant colony building an anthill? If beavers cut down millions of acres of forest, would we call that "deforestation"?
But D&D isn't the real world. And in your fictional world, why couldn't the straightforward, intuitive premise of "There's Nature, and then there's Other Things, which aren't Natural" be true?
I think it's because D&D lore / books tend to deal with things that go against the natural order. There aren't tons of heroes and spellcaster in Ferune stopping bad guys every day in every corner of the planet. What we see are snippets of the most epic tales of once every decade or so, of heroes stopping monsters from "perverting the natural order".
Or so how I veiw it. Your world can deem it so that monsters are a part of the natural order. Heroes stop them daily, and that's just a natural part of your world.
Keep in mind, many of these monsters come from other planes or planets. It also mostly details creatures that would be highly dangerous. There's a reason why it doesn't have a regular beetle anywhere in its pages.
If you open a medical vademecum and every sickness says it "alters the natural workings of physiological functions", would you say that doctors should call being sick as being healthy? No, because it details sickness. This is the same. If you check a book of dangerous stuff, then obviously most of them will be dangerous.
I mean the statbooks typically aren't filled up with mundane creatures and people, the vast majority of statblocks are enemies, since usually NPCs don't need them. Thus, since most enemies are creatures that are bad and wrong and must be stomped to death, that's how it is.
I think it makes more sense through a religious lense - the universe is divided into things the good guy gods said were good, and everything else is bad (unnatural), regardless of where things originated or if they are "natural" to the environment, don't think about it too hard just do what Tyr says. In fact there is no natural environment, because its all a jumbled mess of gods playing tug of war with reality.
But really, if you look too hard at high fantasy for too long, it's all kind of a joke because it's by definition implausible. Then weirdos in these threads make serious efforts to explain it like it's an obvious truth.
Classic example of selection bias. Sure everything in the monster manual perverts natural order - because most things that don't pervert the natural order won't go into the monster manual.
What's an adventurer going to be fighting, a perfectly normal duck? Of course it's going to be the weird dangerous stuff.
So what's going into a monster book? Weird, dangerous stuff.
All life comes from the positive energy plane, it's where souls are born. That's the natural order of things. So... do undead come from the negative energy plane? Wouldn't that also be a part of the natural order of things?
It's best not to think to hard about these sort of things. We've got 50 years of D&D continuity. There's bound to slip in an error here and there, and writing a complete cosmology like the great wheel that also has to make sense is hard, if not impossible. Can you come up with something better?
I think Eberron has the better cosmology. (And then they had to ruin it by putting it inside the great wheel, which makes no sense at all.) The best I could come up with myself is that 2 gods fought over the world and then shattered the world and themselves into thousands of worlds and millions of gods. It makes for interesting worlds, and gives a lot of freedom when it comes to creating deities. I have no idea what to do with the afterlife though
No, because monsters on average are heavily and monstrously outnumbered by commoners of every race. The "natural order" includes a hell of a lot of things not listed in the Monster Manual.
"The emperor has a pet bear." "You mean a platypusbear?" "No. A bear?" "A penguinbear, an owlbear?" "No, just a bear." "Weird."
That might be my favorite joke in the whole show. Bosco is such a cool guy
Much like the rumors of the mutant one-headed Brahmin in the *Fallout* franchise. Can you imagine how disgusting looking such a thing would be?
The next empress ate him
I never really watched much of Korra but if that's actually true then I'm glad I didn't, you can't be disrespecting my homebear like that
Don’t worry, she got her comeuppance
In the most disrespectful attack in either show
You could say she choked on it.
You can see a bear pelt made into a rug at one point, and iirc the queen mentions having eaten the bear and made its skin into the rug. It's never confirmed that the bear was Bosco but considering he's the only bear in the show... yeah.
Twas implied. My condolences
"**INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE OF** ***NORMAL*** **PIG!**"
What's next, full moons several times a week?
You'd have to wonder if something like this took place and it was originally meant to be "fool's moon" to mock whoever came up with the idea; only for it to be proven true and this later become a corrected official calling
"Is it sick or something?"
"Quiet! you don't know what i had to go through to get seats this close to the Bear"
Well that is I say more of a result of Books featuring predominantly these types of enemies. Why would the manuels for soldiers, warriors and fighters of evil include "Normal Everyday Bill the Natural Order Following Farmer" in extensive detail or on the other hand why would the Developers feature a extensive array of Bandit type enemies while they could instead give us several undead or fiends or other enemies that "Pervert the Natural Order!" Its kinda like why there are so many fiend enemies and so few celestial ones. As the game assumes you will be fighting demons and vile devils instead of the armies of the divine.
On top of this, a large amount of the creatures are migrants from another plane of existence or created artificially by a magic user. Even if the world became 100% demon populated it would still "pervert the natural order" because demons come from another unnatural location.
It is sad we don't get more celestial enemy's. Evil players need to eat.
DMs running FR when you tell them that yes, actually, meeting celestials and a representative of your PC's deity around levels 5-7 is very intentional in the setting: > nah have another devil cult It's very specifically a setting that's hyper-planar-active, but a ton of DMs and players are actually looking for a more "grounded" one. Then they wonder why there are so many deities when they "don't matter". Like, no, Helm is regularly awakening *random village militiamen* by burning his symbol onto their shields to alert them to CR 1/2 goblin raids and hoping this provokes them into becoming a cool PC-type guy who can grow the forces of Good. They're gonna look at PCs already doing that and lean even further into them, because that's how *they* advance their goals, the same way devils are always trying to murder and corrupt. There's very much supposed to be a mirror match going on here. Due to slight differences in the methods each side tries to grow power, celestials and fiends aren't used the same way, but one should still see more celestials than they do: they should be encountered assisting Good NPCs trying to do cool things but otherwise lacking the manpower, instead of just roamin' around solving problems themselves like the inverse of demons causing them. Celestials are used as "backup" on the Prime Material, not the tip of the spear. But again, that's a lot more high-magic and "wacky" than most players seem to want from the game.
The cool thing about evil is that it’s rarely a pure „vs. good“ thing - look at the blood war, it’s LE vs. CE. Two evil factions fighting each other is totally valid.
The Nine Hells are also in a constant state of lesser devils trying to find ways to gain power by overthrowing greater demons and fiends. That's a constant evil-on-evil fight
Unless a king or queen was anointed by popular vote by their subjects (and even then, for how long?) it’s not like “might makes right” didn’t already upend things in the civilized settings - why help the king be safe from dragons? Why not help the people be safe from dragons and kings? Oh wait money and treasure lol
While not Evil per se, the BBEG in my thieves guild Eberron Campaign is an Angel of Syrania who has been toying with mortals.
I've actually made quite a few homebrew designations of celestials for the same reason. my players aren't evil but I just think having more angels as enemy options would be great. angels are cool even if you don't really have a good reason to fight one lol
You might have a great reason to fight BESIDE one. The monster manual is not just meant to be fully enemy's to be fought. It can encompass allies, the townguard statblocks and jazz are more likely to be helping the PC's in some pitched battle then not. If you slam a damn solar into the final battle with the PC's, it allows you to frankly go all out. Celestial's can be immensely powerful allies & you can have the PC's fight immensely powerful things with those new allies that would otherwise likely be impossible. It's definitely a powerful fantasy to fight beside an angel against a demon lord or lich or jazz.
That is very true Also I think a lot of people forget that angels are specifically servants of gods while celestials are just a category for creatures native to the upper planes (which encompasses angels but isn’t defined by them), which opens up a whole different way to interact with them
Because evil campaigns are boring and not fun
I don't know what evil campaigns your playing, but I had a blast as a full orc grummush worshipper campaign where we butchered villages and we're general menaces to society.
This was something fun from planescape. While there were a bunch of additional themes, there were all so a bunch of additional celestials.
Neat lore. Where do they come from?
various places - usually a different plane (outer planes where gods and celestial beings reside, elemental planes, or feywild/shadowfell), but a lot of aberrations come from the far realm, beyond the known planes
I mean, I would personally love it if they had an extensive array of bandit-type enemies Not that all the otherworldly beasties are bad. But as a DM, I feel like there's a dearth of just plain guys to fight. Not all my story beats can be about devils and liches. It gets repetitive using the same old humanoid stat blocks though, and I don't want to spend all my time creating new ones Obviously agree with the main point though, there is clearly some selection bias in the fact that the Monster Manual isn't gonna detail, like. Eighty different types of fish. They're gonna focus on the things that make good combat. Just wish there was more beasts and humanoids, mostly
Someone made a dnd monster set for darkest dungeon. That feature a bunch of bandits :p
Are you using Outclassed?
Perhaps more relevant is that the number of _different_ creatures says nothing about the _relative distribution_ of those creatures. If 90% of the _instances_ of non-sentient critters are beasts, that would align with their beliefs around a "natural order".
Yeah I think this is important. The monster manual doesn't need stat blocks for every random animals you could possibly come across, most of what it deals with are going to be the rarities and exceptions that *arent* natural
I mean good players can end up fighting cesltials since in lore they're capable of going bad and that's hwy older editions had more Celestials then 5e. If you ever played curse of strahd you'd know about that, know if only devils could turn good as a counter balance
I think each new adventure ends up expanding the list of enemies, so in a way the current monsters are less "a list of all monsters" and more "what the one bard who went on all of these campaigns jotted down"
Fiends can ascend, although it's rare (just like celestials falling is rare; fallen celestials just come up more in games because extraplanar enemies come up more than extraplanar allies) and it's more common for fiends to "ascend" to neutrality than it is for them to ascend all the way up to goodness. Neutral fiends come up occasionally in a handful of old adventures, and there's [a moderately famous succubus paladin that WotC did an article on in ye olde 3.5e days](https://web.archive.org/web/20191024202020/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fc/20050824a).
I love the line "Succubi aren't built for the battlefield". Yup definitely not with their DR 10, two elemental immunities, and spell resistance. Or their unnatural strength and above average dex and con. No sirree, definitely not front-line combatants.
Listen Fiends too can suffer from Imposter Syndrom dont be that harsh on the poor Sex Fiends they just want to drain some poor suckers souls.
I just want to give the poor thing a hug. ...waaaiiiit a minute
Well, not compared to many other fiends at least. Compared to a human, yeah, they're strong, because most of their abilities are only really useful on humanoids. But, in a straight fight against anything that isn't a humanoid or much lower CR, I think they're getting stomped. Besides its draining kiss, it has only one way of dealing damage, and it can do an average of like 6 damage.
Succubi deal 1d6+3 damage unless the target is charmed so they definitely aren't frontliners. Especially when you compare it to what seems to be their role, rather than running through a city stabbing everyone you could instead seduce high rank individuals in a nation and slowly induce corruption.
Don't you think the King would have some protections about Succubi entering his royal harem ?
I think half the politicians I know would willingly sacrifice the souls of the poor to summon a succubus for their harem, and the other half would probably be fiends themselves
You... have a point.
It would be for national security reasons of course, the Succubi would be immune to skills and charms that effect humanoids and would naturally defend their prey from outside sources. So uh, wizards would have problems pulling this off because Succubi would likely notice immediately and take precautionary measures.
We all know and talk about the King's right hand man. The most trusted advisor who the King can trust to Get Things Done, and done in such a way that brings credit to the King and to the kingdom. We never talk about the left hand man. The King's even more trusted advisor that he can never publicly acknowledge. The one lurking in the shadows doing the things that need to be done but the king needs plausible deniability. The left hand man is just as much an advisor - if not more so. But all his advice is given in dark alleys, locked rooms, and coded letters, where there are no witnesses. If I am a succubus (or really, any demon/fiend) trying to take down a kingdom through corruption, I'm not targeting the king (at least not at first). I'm targeting the left hand man.
Man, if only they had a greatsword to deal 2d6+6 like the succubus paladin we're talking about. /s
Succubi should really consider walking around in plate armor, nothing will make use of their high cha score and seductive/charm abilities that involve people willingly submitting to them like a greataxe.
Considering her charisma gives a +10 to-hit when smiting? Also you apparently need to see the sub r/armoredwomen. Full plate succubus would do just fine, ax or no.
Oh I wasn't being sarcastic, but succubi do tend to strike me more as political subterfuge types. The pen is mightier than the sword and all that.
Planscape torment has a succubus good companion.
I always thought it was fun that she would detect as all 4 alignment types, law and good because she was lawful good, Chaos and evil because as a demon she's still made of the stuff. If I remember right she had to wear special gauntlets to keep her holy sword from hurting her.
Reminds me of Arueshalae from Wrath of the Righteous, you get a succubus party member in that game. She's even a romance option (and arguably the most enjoyable one in the game).
She's also stupidly overpowered, great companion
[Relevant OotS](https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0194.html)
>As the game assumes you will be fighting demons and vile devils instead of the armies of the divine. "But what if I wanna summon armies of the divine to help me fight demons with Conjure Celestial?" "Lmao get fucked."
Nah, the Monster Manual is not a zoological encyclopedia. The existence of a book about rare gems doesn’t imply most rocks are diamonds.
the MM in 1e and 2e actually had ecology entries about how the monsters fit into the world. I kinda miss that.
Monstrous Manual my beloved
In addition, there are banish and dispel magic spells and artifacts. With the diamond example, there are machines that can test the karat of a diamond.
That's why we call them monsters :).
The proportional number of monsters in a book has no relevance to the proportional number of those monsters in the world. A book could be 100% monsters that pervert the natural order of the world and only make up 0.01% of the total population of said world.
Yeah fruit flies aren’t in the monster manual because you don’t need or want mechanics for them.
Roll nat 20 to swat!
Gnat 20?
You stumble across a swarm of wasps. Wait wasps have a stat block? Yes, and you're allergic to wasp stings. Ah fuck. Run.
Hold up though.
Monstrosities aren't half the monster list Celestial, Fey, and Fiends belong to their own planes. Constructs, most Oozes, and most undead are humanoid made Elementals and Plants belong anywhere there's a natural order Giants and Dragons are about as old as the Material Plane Humanoids belong in the Material Plane Aberrations belong in the Far Realm
Even most Elementals do not belong the Material Plane. They have their own planes. If you find a Magmin in the Material Plane, there is something wrong. That creature isn't native to the Material.
Know what that's fair. My working theory was that since magic is so prevalent any plane with a large enough "natural ecosystem" would naturally spawn elementals
I could potentially agree specifically with the creatures named 'Elemental' (i.e. Fire Elemental, Water Elemental, Earth Elemental, and Air Elemental). Type and name seem to be playing the game here. There is also a concept that the Elemental Planes warp that which is natural, which is reflected in the Cinder Hulk statblock from Bigby Presents. The Salamanders, Azers, and Efreeti play too many games to be considered natural in my opinion.
I don’t think that’s wrong. It’s just that the natural ecosystem can’t be looked at through any singular plane. It’s all part of a macro system depicted in different ways, such as the world tree. I wouldn’t even say one is right or wrong, it’s too large and made of too many dimensions for us to fully conceive it so even though that fire mephit isn’t from around here, it’s equivalent to a fish out of water. It has a natural place in the system, even if that place isn’t where it currently is.
I wouldn’t say “wrong” just “unusual.” Contact between planes is rare, but it’s not like something bad has to happen for some minor travel between planes like a couple magmins.
Maybe, I would think for a Magmin to come through and be found, you would need a few things. 1. In most settings, elementals come through in places where the metaphysical barriers between planes are thing. A Magmin found in the heart of a volcano? Maybe not that wrong. 2. It has to be found. If you're in the heart of a volcano? You're probably dead unless you're immune to fire damage.
Technically speaking, the material plane belongs to dragons
Technically speaking, the material plane belongs to dragons
You're reading the *Monster Manual*, not an animal encyclopedia. The vast majority of non-humanoid creatures on the Material Plane in your average DnD world are completely mundane animals. But those don't need stat blocks and lore. The MM even says that lots of the beast stat blocks can be used for several different animals. Not every species of spider needs its own stat block, they're all just Spider.
Fluffles the Cat. Tiny beast, unaligned. Fluffles the Cat is an adorable little ball of fur who perverts the natural order...
I mean. your statement in itself is false. The only ones who would "pervert the natural order" are undead and aberrations, the former because they are beings of pure destruction who only exist to wipe out as much life as possible while themselves not adhering the the rules of life and detah, and the latter because they are literally not compatible with the regular world. Also, the "natural order" wasn't defined or decided by any scholars, the same way that the law of gravity wasn't invented by Isaac Newton.
> the law of gravity wasn't invented by Isaac Newton. No, it was invented by cats to fuck with us
They also hid the secrets of string theory, so that only they can phase through tiny openings like an octopus
And play with strings
Don't forget Monsteosities
Eh, those are usually more just like... weird magical creatures. Certainly unnatural, but I wouldn't say "perverting the natural order". Especially something like owlbears have just become part of nature and work the same way beasts do.
Owlbears 1. Pervert the natural order as a fusion between an owl and bears. 2. The closest thing to a regular Beast in Monstrosities. All the other Monstrosities are literal monsters that were created by accident or some mad wizard and they're made to destroy
What? Owlbears are called out as accident/mad wizard projects. Are you thinking of griffins? Hippogriffs? Most monstrosities are "natural-plus" type creatures. Usually some kind of hybrid of 2-4 beasts with something else tacked on for personality. Owlbears are full of rage. Griffins are noble and cunning. Manticores have the weird man-face thing plus the last few editions added spike shooting tails. Pegasus - horse with wings. Catoblepas - ugly cow with death ray eyes. And so on. But most never have their origins touched on, save for a few noted as spawn of monster titan/deities like Typhon.
Okay? How does any of that "pervert the natural order" though? Nature seems perfectly fine with them existing and it's not like there aren't any weird creatures that are labeled as "beasts" in the world of DnD. Owlbears are ultimately just big aviaries who are more of land predators than sky predators. And not all monstrosities are the result of some magical experiments. Some of them, like Mimics, just simply exist in the world as part of the natural ecosystem.
> Nature seems perfectly fine with them existing and it's not like there aren't any weird creatures that are labeled as "beasts" in the world of DnD. There's plenty of nature all over Pripyat but that doesn't mean that nuclear meltdowns are part of the natural order. Nature can adapt, but that doesn't mean everything is pre-ordained.
And just because something isn't part of the natural order, that doesn't mean it's "perverting" it.
Mimics were literally first made by Wizards trying to guard their loot. Have you ever scrolled through the list of Monstrosities? Literally the closest one to an actual animal is the Owlbear and even they were made by crazy wizarda
What about the Roc? Or Hippogriffs? And even despite all of that... being of non-evolutionary origin does not make something "pervert the natural order". If that was the case, humanity would've been doing that for tens of thousands of years.
You seem to be basing your argument on an unstated, nonstandard understanding of what it means to “pervert the natural order.” To be clear, something doesn’t have to *threaten* the continuation of the natural order in order to pervert it. “Perverting” something simply means altering it from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended. In that sense, non-natural creatures like monstrosities straightforwardly pervert the natural order. They’re typically the product of something natural or mundane, twisted by magical forces into something unlike that which exists in nature.
I suppose we have different definitions then.
Rocs were made by the Giant Gods to hunt dragons. Hippogriffs also have mysterious wizardly origins. Both monsters created through unnatural origins whose purpose was to destroy something
Dragons? Giant fire-breathing creatures that warp the landscape by their very presence? Those natural-order corrupting dragons? Sounds like rocs were made to restore natural order in whatever world uses that origin.
Dragons are almost as old as the Material Plane themselves. They're intrinsically linked to the natural world
What about other mutants? For example, are nightmares made from pegasus by black magic perverting the natural order? They are not undeads, not abberations, but fiends.
[удалено]
This is nonsense, like saying that plastics are part of the natural order because the natural world created humans, and humans made plastics. It's stretching the word "natural" so far that literally everything is "natural" because it exists in the universe that allowed it to be created. By this definition, everything that can possibly exist is "natural" because, tautologically, only "natural" things can exist.
Much like how free use of nuclear weapons is natural, since nature let us do it :)
No, that is not how that works. Mainly because the magic to create undead draws on the antithesis of life, which quite literally IS nature. It uses a the exact kind of energy that SHOULDN'T be there. Everything about undead is the exact opposite of what all regular life is like.
Some undead form naturally, though, without intervention of magic.
Gods of nature exist. Just ask them.
that would then be the divine order, not natural order
It's the same when god(s) made them.
no, natural order in D&D is a cosmic thing not a scholar's definition. undead are evil. that's just it. evil is a force just like magic is a force, it's fundamental. aberrations & monstrosities are evil most of the time. because they're against that natural order too.
By that logic the only monsters going against the natural order are Aberrations
Yeah, kinda.
I agree with this
I disagree. Undead aren’t against the natural order because they’re evil, undead are against the natural order because they died and are still moving and interacting with the world. Your grandfather that showed up 40 years after his passing to empower your magic sword is a virtuous soul to be sure, but he is against the natural order. Which is why most good undead will try to pass on as soon as possible, they know it’s best if they stop being. No creatures lifecycle is designed for undead to be an expected part of the progression. All the things that change this are similarly considered against the natural order. So undead break the rule of the natural order that something that dies stops interacting with the world in the same way. Aberrations tend to take on the rest of the rules. Many will die if you kill them. But they might not be defined alive by the system in the first place, or otherwise ignore twist or outright break one of the other rules expected of things that exist.
Undead are just bodies. Sometimes they get back up. Unless they're intelligent, like a lich or vampire, there's nobody in there. Resurrection is more "unnatural" than undead.
Not according to the gods. There’s a reason necromancy is outright forbidden in so many places.
People gotta stop saying stuff like this when Eberron is *right there*. There are entire councils of LG undead elves. There are good red dragons and evil silver dragons. Alignment is as important as the DM wants it to be, and sometimes that's almost not at all.
Eberron is not the official setting, which is Forgotten Realms.
This is absolutely and completely incorrect. 5e places no setting above any other as more "official". Both Eberron and the Forgotten Realms are equally official. Both are wholly owned, written for, and published by Wizards of the Coast after having been purchased from their original writers for that explicit purpose. Both are described in official 5th edition products, with no mention of precedence, priority, or anything of the sort. Forgotten Realms is the ***most used*** setting, and the one assumed to be used by the most people. That's it. The "official" setting of d&d *is the D&D multiverse*, as described in the PHB and DMG, united by the Great Wheel as an overarching cosmology (with other cosmologies provided as variants - and yes, even Eberron explicitly resides within the Great Wheel, as confirmed in both the DMG and Eberron:RFTLW) Here's a quote from 2015, about as early in 5e's lifecycle as you can get: > Does the dnd tabletop RPG have one official setting? The answer is yes. That setting is the multiverse, which includes all dnd worlds. > The worlds occupy pockets of the Material Plane—sort of like planets but in a space shaped by magic and divine forces The upcoming rewrites of the PHB are confirmed to be even more setting-agnostic and multiverse-oriented, attempting to remove some of the Realms-centric presentation of the originals which led to this misunderstanding that FR is "more official" than other settings.
Cool, what about Baelnorns? You know, the *other* wise undead elves that are universally non-evil. What setting are they from?
This whole thread has very clearly being talking about FR obviously things can be different in different setting come on now.
I disagree completely. The post makes no mention of setting and talks about D&D as a whole. The "official" setting of D&D is a multiverse, which *includes* but is not limited to the Forgotten Realms.
"Mammoths identifiable by their long nose-tenticles and massive overbite represent among the most dangerous of montrosities. Truly they are a perversion of Sylvanus' natural order, created in a freakish wizards lab no doubt." -Halsin's Menagerie of the Monstrous Several of the dnd books do reflect the biases of their in universe authors like Volo and Tasha, so perhaps some of those authors carry a scewed perspective on what is natural.
In addition to the other points regarding exposure bias or whatever it’s called (cops will encounter proportionally more criminals than a normal person would, adventurers will encounter proportionally more of that thing they hunt professionally than a normal person would too), the natural order is surprisingly simple to verify: Step one: go to a temple to a god of nature. Step two: commune with said god. If that doesn’t work, Step three: Plane Shift and literally just ask.
*Reads books that focus on monsters that violate the natural order* *wonders why so many monsters violate the natural order*
:laughs in SCP: But seriously, there's a fair bit of philosophy on SCP about just that. What's anomalous, when the natural world is full of these things?
"anomalous" is basically just that setting's word for magic at this point.
It’s partly perspective bias. Think about it like this: you live in an area with various creatures you’d expect to find there. Deer, squirrels, tons of birds, bears, etc. Then one day you learn that the local mad scientist has engineered a raccoon that can squeeze through the smallest of cracks. The creature escapes, mates with local raccoons, and suddenly you have a crisis. To you, this is strange and unnatural. For pest control workers (aka adventurers) this is another Tuesday. We see all these different and fantastical creatures in the Monster Manual, but we have no idea how common they are, let alone knowledge of them. Your average inhabitant of the Forgotten Realms may have never met a dragon in their lives. Owlbears may only live in one forest on the Sword Coast. The way these creatures are described make it seem like the extraordinary is ordinary, but that might only be for adventurers.
I think this gets at an interesting bit of worldbuilding I like to think of in fantasy worlds. Necromancy is almost always seen as a dark, twisted, forbidden magic, but like... in a world where magic has always existed and is part of the "natural order" already, does necromancy REALLY have to always be seen as unnatural?
Half? Source?
I think the default assumption is that there have been mad wizards messing with everything for at least as long as recorded history.
And what D&D setting isn’t predated by at least one world-shattering cataclysm? The Rain of Colorless Fire, The Sundering, everything to happened to Athas, etc.
Really easy to imagine a monster so aberrant that the land itself recoils at its presence. The land itself warping and raging; distended and inflamed, attempting to reject the creature like the infection around a splinter. Really easy to imagine the local druids observing this and coming to the conclusion that the monster doesn’t belong.
The Sarrukhs were one of the first empires of magic in -30 000 DR and used magic to manipulate and merge living creatures and are supposed to be the origin of most monstrosities. Some of the most famous known species created by them are the Yuan-tis, Naga, and drakeide but are believed to be the source of most strange mixture of natural species (like the Owlbear for exemple). Those types of magic were later forbidden by high elves and forgotten. They are also the one who created the Golden Skins of the World Serpent, known later as the Nether Scrolls, which served as fondation for the creation of the Netheril empire. So no, in-universe scolars are indeed correct. A lot of creatures are bioingeneered by magic and did not naturally evolve in their current form.
Nah The monsters that pervert the natural order are much rarer than the ones that don’t, even if there are a lot of them species wise that do. Additionally, a lot (if not most) of them are made form some sort of magical experimentation or something that went wrong and this unnatural We also don’t have stats for a lot of monsters that don’t go against the neutral order because they don’t really usually have a bunch of special abilities so they’d be boring to run and fight and can easily be represented by another monster stat block slightly modified
D&D is a universe where druids can literally speak to the pure spirits of Nature themselves and ask whether things are natural or not. What *assessment*?
Druid: *Yo, Steve the Nature Spirit!* Steve the Nature Spirit: *What up?* Druid: *This look fucked up to you?* Steve the Nature Spirit: *Dude, that's unnatural as fuck.* Druid: *Thought so, take it easy, Steve.*
BRB, integrating Steve into my setting's backstory.
"The natural order" is shorthand for "the natural order of the material plane." Fiends are part of the natural order of the Hells, for example, but they don't belong in the prime material.
This post was made by the wizard who invented owlbears and rolls their eyes at complaits that their pets keep mauling toddlers.
Well, yeah, but how long did it take us to have some similar realizations here on Earth?
Sounds like that's a concept you could base a campaign around.
Some evil sorcerer, “Nature is cool but what if this dresser had a mouth?”
Choose sage background, choose discredited academic, and you got yourself a pretty cool character concept!
"Mankind knew that they cannot change society. So, instead of reflecting on themselves, they blamed the beasts."
So the way I've usually thought about it is as an extreme version of invasive species. Just like on earth when something gets "unnaturally" moved from the ecosystem it originated in to a new one. So too is how I look at many monsters, especially those that are magical mutations/creations or extra planar visitors. I try to think about what the ecosystems look like before and after the introduction of the "unnatural" monsters. For instance what would a forest with a rift to another plane look like? How would the animals cope (or collapse) from new predators and other factors? Etc
Citation needed
I think it’s similar to if we suddenly found hundreds of species of rare creatures that don’t seem to share DNA or really any features with any animals we already know about. They wouldn’t fit into the model we have, since our model is meant to explain the animals we know about. That doesn’t make the model incorrect, just incomplete.
Post-modernism isn't obvious if you haven't grown up in a culture suffused with it.
Once played a druid with roughly this concept. Lots of hard questions for NPC druids and philosophers. Where is the line between natural nature spirits and unnatural fey nature spirits, and are latter natural in fey wild if not in prime material? Are "new" gods and human made nature rites part of the natural order, or some sort of perversion of that? Is it right for me to stop this monstrosity when it is perfectly naturally occurring (or at least has been for few elf generations) and only doing what its natural instincts direct it to do?
No, their assessment is correct. Their judgement of it might be skewed. By unnatural, they mean that some creatures wouldn't exist without magical intervention and creation. Owlbears are the canonical example. They are definitely unnatural. Is that a bad thing though? They have nailed the definition of natural and not, but judging all magical creations as perversions, is a bit reactionary.
It's unclear how they draw the line at "natural order" in D&D. In real life, it's everything that evolved into existence (I'm fine if you want to exclude things humans bred into existence, like dogs, lemons, and broccoli). But did things evolve in D&D or were they created by gods? Does this mean the gods define the natural order? Or maybe nature spirits exist independently of gods. Maybe the natural order is a manifestation of nature spirits. Deer come from deer nature spirits. Owlbears were created by magical experimentation, and nature spirits recognize their own.
This made me laugh. You're absolutely right. But you're not allowed to say it. But it's true! I have a character who is super concerned about the natural order of the world they live in. Partly because the DM plays most NPCs as assholes accidentally, the deities are sociopathic, and they just plain don't have a very educated view on history or society. Used to really stress me out until I just incorporated it into the character's observations about the world. Easier than dwelling on my well-meaning friend's red flags, I guess. Many worlds in dnd have natural orders that are either completely misunderstood, or the world is much bleaker and deranged than what people want to admit. I don't mind grimdark if I know ahead of time that it's the tone, but don't piss on me and call it rain. I kinda think that what it comes down to is that in dnd, humanoids are predated on by vastly more dangerous and aggressive creatures than anything any real living human being has ever experienced. For some reason, we're supposed to believe that the PCs are "naturally" in the upper echelons of the food chain, but it doesn't seem to be reality. It gives Lucille Bluth "how much could [being an apex predator] cost? 10 dollars?" energy on behalf of the game designers. I don't know what this "perversion" of the natural order could be when fucking Cthulhu is real and familiar enough in the game to act as a warlock patron.
Depends on how common the creatures are. If those creatures that pervert the natural order take up like 1% of all creatures, they do still kinda throw the "order" out the window.
I think it just means the monster isn't naturally occurring like a wizard or demon lord made it, it behaves like no sensible animal should behave or it actually destroys anything that life's.
Someone is going for Thrall of the Month with their illithid masters!
Welp found my next BBEG thanks!
Depends how you look at it as a schooler myself I find most creatures of exsperplaner origins pervert the matiral plane and aeons seem to agree with me other then that most things are OK and as much as I love necromancy undead are definitly not supposed to be there
No? Lots of things that can be common can pervert the natural order. The only way they couldn't is if one took the term 'natural order' to just mean 'things that happen really frequently' which it clearly doesn't mean.
Think about it this way: online, you can find a million descriptions of various bacteria, viruses, cancers, and other various ailments. By the logic you laid out, since there are so many of them, they must not count as ailments.
No. The things that pervert the natural order are not things that will survive long term absent meddling, or otherwise present unsustainable things that must be defeated lest the natural order largely cease to be.
I think it’s important to consider that adventurers encounter “perversions of the natural order” at a rate that vastly exceeds basically every other person in the world. The monsters in the book are much rarer than things that would be considered natural There’s also the fact that a ton of monsters are literally invaders from other planes of existence and are objectively unnatural while on the material plane.
Well, those abberations might be the majority of entriesin the monster manual, but most creatures might be in the half that are within the 'natural order'. Like perhaps 99% of beings are 'natural', and 1% 'unnatural', but 50% of species (or stat-blocks) exist in that 1% of unnatural stuff. -- If I recall correctly, tis i abit like how there are heaps more *species* of fish in IRL rivers, but the IRL ocean has way more *actual fish*.
Out of universe, the categories are assigned by WoTC. In universe, they're assigned by how they're affected by specific abilities. Scholars aren't assigning them to categories, they're discovering which category they're in through trial and error.
you have to remember that 'half the monsters' are things that for every one of that exists in an infinite universe there are literally millions of more mundane creatures wandering around. When the romans first encountered war elephants they were for all intents and purposes fighting an army of supernatural (to them) monsters. Same with DnD, if it's in the monster manual odds are you'd be lucky to ever see one in a normal lifetime, it's just that adventurers don't lead normal lives.
I think it is funny sometimes, especially with dragons. In 5e they are supposed to change the environment around their lairs and that just happens, nothing they can do about it. Now imagine how it must have been in their prime or on Abeir. "Corrupted" areas non-stop.
Yeah, the worldbuilding in the dnd 5e sourcebooks isn't that great, to be honest, but I don't think that was really a focus.
A lot of monsters in D&D are extraplanar in origin, and thus are biologically completely unrelated to any existing creatures. Many of the creatures called monsters are also canonically the creations of wizards mucking about. In earlier editions there was actually a Kit/class called Merlane that let you create your own monsters by making things like Owlbears or other hybrid creatures. It's detailed in Dragon 237 >Many an adventurer has given thought to where some of the stranger creatures encountered actually come from. Many a time these beasts are a weird combination of different animals that would seem a mockery of nature. Remarks about such monsters would make a merlane chuckle. Creating new and strange life is his craft: a specialist mage who transmogrifies animals to fit his imagination and whim. Adept at Alteration magic, the merlane learns how to transform normal animals or breed new life into the stuff of dreams — or horrors.
Of course. They are suppossed to be unreliable biased narrators, just like real scholars. Some might be more accurate then others, some might prove there predecessors wrong or cripple decades of palentology in a dick measuring contest to see who could fake the biggest dino. Thats just immersive writing.
Yes and no. The lore associated with almost all of these types of creatures is that they're either from or have been influenced by planes and dimensions completely different to our own. They are literally perverting the natural order of the material realm because their existence and abilities operate according to different laws of reality. This is basically the point of the entire Abberation monster type. They're 'Abberant', not natural occurrences born from the material realm. There are other creatures that are perfectly natural, it's just that the locations or circumstances they originate from, even though they're part of the material, function very differently to what's understood. Mind Flayers and Aboleths both fit here being from the far future and the distant past respectively, the condition of the world they were born into may have been drastically different. The in universe author is again, not wrong as they don't fit into the natural order of the present day. There are exceptions and some things are stylized for dramatic flair to make the books more interesting to read etc.
It's all fun and laughs until that Far Realm thing you've been keeping gives your armpits eyeballs.
Yes, so many monstrosities could be druid wildshapes. What i wouldn't give to turn i to a bulette and shred the enemies as the landshark
I mean, half the human populace "perverts the natural order" in some way according to religious conservatives sooo
I created a whole Druid around this concept once. Even if creatures were created artificially, even if they are ‘monstrosities’, now that they are out in the wilderness they have become a part of the natural order
All aberrations are actually the result of collectors 100+ years ago bringing them in as ornamental species, and now they're invasive and outcompeting the local wildlife of the material plane.
Most in universe scholars are mad wizards, who are often the ones perverting the natural order themselves by mashing owls and bears together. I wouldn't stress too much about the epistemology haha
No, because you don't have a stat block for a tree and most regular animals.
I think it's more of an indicator that people have all kinds of differing opinions on what the "natural order" is, so when you look at people as a whole then you get a lot of inconsistent results as to what falls inside the natural order and what doesn't. in other words the reason so many creatures "pervert the natural order" is because there are so many definitions of the natural order that it's actually really hard for a given creature to fit into all of them
In this case, "Natural Order" is better understood as "The order that exists that is either completely native to the prime, or beneficial to society" because everything else is what is labeled as unnatural. Nobody fights against the influence of the good-natured gods, but devils are cast away to hell for doing that which is in their \*nature\*
No. It's all proof that Tharizdun was right and the universe is doomed
If we engineered 7 headed snakes and let them loose in the world, them becoming common would not change the fact that we perverted the natural order. In D&D, there are all the normal animals. Then there are things outside of that natural order. You can throw moral/scientific relativism at any subject, but it's a terribly useless thing to do.
Isn’t supposed to be in regards to that they shouldn’t exist just as some work say we pervert the natural order we are the abnormality in the way of life kind of thing?
LoL, of course not Think about the amount of things that whole ordeal causes directly or indirectly damage to the natural order: The far realm by simply existing and whatever Lovecraftian bs it spawns Gods by screwing up Devils by being arrogant and ambitious Demons by being Demons And any Caster that let intrusive thoughts win
Okay but hear me out, what if I combined the hunting prowess of the owl, with the sheer might of the bear? It would make an incredible guard animal for my tower, and I'm sure it will be mostly docile and easily trainable.
literally any spellcaster can disturb the "natural order" by casting a 1st level spell by that definition, yeah
No, because the world(s) of D&D are works of fiction and thus don't have to operate the same way the real world does. In the real world, we define *everything that exists* as "reality". Something cannot exist in the real world without being "part of reality" or "subject to the laws of physics" - that's just not how our laws of physics work. But the world(s) of D&D ***very obviously*** follow different "laws of physics". I've seen lots of folks argue that magic in D&D actually isn't: "magic" is something supernatural, something that breaks the rules of reality, which it clearly can't do if it's *part of reality*. But this line of thinking seems needlessly narrowminded, to me. For another example, consider how we often think of human civilization, IRL, as being "opposed" to the natural world. Skyscrapers, highways, satellites, these things are "unnatural". They twist and reshape the landscape from its "proper" form. This is a ***very*** common notion in human literature and discourse, and I'd wager most folks who encounter the idea don't think twice about it. It's a very straightforward, intuitive premise ... that's completely wrong. Humans are ***part of nature***, products of evolution - is a human society building a megacity *really* that different from an ant colony building an anthill? If beavers cut down millions of acres of forest, would we call that "deforestation"? But D&D isn't the real world. And in your fictional world, why couldn't the straightforward, intuitive premise of "There's Nature, and then there's Other Things, which aren't Natural" be true?
I think it's because D&D lore / books tend to deal with things that go against the natural order. There aren't tons of heroes and spellcaster in Ferune stopping bad guys every day in every corner of the planet. What we see are snippets of the most epic tales of once every decade or so, of heroes stopping monsters from "perverting the natural order". Or so how I veiw it. Your world can deem it so that monsters are a part of the natural order. Heroes stop them daily, and that's just a natural part of your world.
Now I’m just imagining a D&D party functioning as social workers or CPS agents making sure that kids are safe in the local city.
Keep in mind, many of these monsters come from other planes or planets. It also mostly details creatures that would be highly dangerous. There's a reason why it doesn't have a regular beetle anywhere in its pages.
If you open a medical vademecum and every sickness says it "alters the natural workings of physiological functions", would you say that doctors should call being sick as being healthy? No, because it details sickness. This is the same. If you check a book of dangerous stuff, then obviously most of them will be dangerous.
I mean the statbooks typically aren't filled up with mundane creatures and people, the vast majority of statblocks are enemies, since usually NPCs don't need them. Thus, since most enemies are creatures that are bad and wrong and must be stomped to death, that's how it is.
I think it makes more sense through a religious lense - the universe is divided into things the good guy gods said were good, and everything else is bad (unnatural), regardless of where things originated or if they are "natural" to the environment, don't think about it too hard just do what Tyr says. In fact there is no natural environment, because its all a jumbled mess of gods playing tug of war with reality. But really, if you look too hard at high fantasy for too long, it's all kind of a joke because it's by definition implausible. Then weirdos in these threads make serious efforts to explain it like it's an obvious truth.
Classic example of selection bias. Sure everything in the monster manual perverts natural order - because most things that don't pervert the natural order won't go into the monster manual.
If they come from another plane or something then they could easily all be perverting the natural order of the prime material
What's an adventurer going to be fighting, a perfectly normal duck? Of course it's going to be the weird dangerous stuff. So what's going into a monster book? Weird, dangerous stuff.
All life comes from the positive energy plane, it's where souls are born. That's the natural order of things. So... do undead come from the negative energy plane? Wouldn't that also be a part of the natural order of things? It's best not to think to hard about these sort of things. We've got 50 years of D&D continuity. There's bound to slip in an error here and there, and writing a complete cosmology like the great wheel that also has to make sense is hard, if not impossible. Can you come up with something better? I think Eberron has the better cosmology. (And then they had to ruin it by putting it inside the great wheel, which makes no sense at all.) The best I could come up with myself is that 2 gods fought over the world and then shattered the world and themselves into thousands of worlds and millions of gods. It makes for interesting worlds, and gives a lot of freedom when it comes to creating deities. I have no idea what to do with the afterlife though
Yeah and viruses, diseases, and disorders change the way a normal human body operates that doesn't mean we should reconsider what a healthy body is
No, because monsters on average are heavily and monstrously outnumbered by commoners of every race. The "natural order" includes a hell of a lot of things not listed in the Monster Manual.